The present invention relates to apparatus and methods used to perform validation of credit card numbers.
A commercial transaction conducted by a telephone call between a business and a customer is often concluded by the business accepting the customer's credit card number in order to bill the customer for any product or service sold to the customer. However, before completing the sale, the business normally performs a credit check on the customer's credit card number to ensure that the number is valid. Such credit checking, as is known in the art, is performed by the business using a telecommunications connection to a credit-checking service to which the credit card number is passed for validation.
Usually, the business will subscribe to a number of telecommunication facilities (loop supervision, etc.) in order to provide the appropriate number of communication lines to support the business's communication needs. In the case of the above mentioned commercial transaction, one or more of these lines is used for establishing a connection to the credit-checking service. As a result, in determining the number of communication lines needed to support the business, the business must take into account the use of additional communications lines to perform credit checking. For example, if the volume of credit checks that need to be performed is high, the business may subscribe to a dedicated private line service; or, if the volume is low, the business may occasionally use one of its loop supervision lines for dial-up access to the credit-checking service.